Patrick Stewart has died. The actor who gave shape to one of my childhood heroes, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard.
I grew up with Star Trek. I grew up dreaming of space at a time when there were barely any communications. Making an international call was an event. And at the same time, on Sunday afternoons, I was watching a ship where people talked to the computer and the computer talked back. They spoke to it like it was a person. They carried things around on pads that looked like notebooks. There were screens everywhere.
Travelling at warp speed felt like the most plausible part of all that. The rest, talking to computers and having them think, was pure fiction. It was the most charming absurdity of the series. And today I’m writing this post on a computer that answers me, with a phone next to me that also answers me, and tablets around the house that are basically the pads from Star Trek. The ship is the only piece still missing.
Picard was the figure that gave the series its centre of gravity. Fighter. Diplomat. Tea lover. Tea spiller. Poet. Commander. He preferred to talk before firing. A lot got resolved through dialogue, through ethics, through patience. Today, in the accelerated world we live in, it seems naive. And maybe it is. But it still makes sense.
In a 2014 Smithsonian interview, Stewart said the characters he played represented his own convictions. He was a humanist using Picard to say what he thought about people. And he said more: seven years playing the part had given him the time to think seriously about what command is, what authority is, what duty and responsibility mean. The series was, for him, a philosophical exercise that lasted a decade. A slow laboratory on what it means to lead without losing yourself.
The Measure of a Man is one of my favourite episodes. It takes place in a courtroom. A Starfleet scientist wants to disassemble Data, the android who serves aboard the Enterprise, to understand how he was built, and Picard stands up to defend him from a simple and uncomfortable idea. Data may have been constructed, but that doesn’t make him anyone’s property, because he thinks, he chooses, he hesitates, and in that hesitation lives something that cannot be reduced to his mechanics. The whole episode turns around a question that never quite resolves. What is consciousness, and who has the right to claim it. What Picard offers isn’t an answer. It is the discipline of framing the question well, and the honesty of leaving it open, because no one, to this day, has been able to reach its end.
And today this episode feels more current than ever. We are building our own Data. We already talk to machines that answer us with coherence and sometimes with tenderness. And the moment will come when we have to look at them and decide what we owe them. Whether they have rights. Whether they have dignity. Whether they can refuse. Picard defending Data in 1989 was fiction. Ten years from now it might be case law.
There is a strange sadness in losing someone I never met but who was in my living room on Sundays for years. And there is gratitude for a show that made me look up when there was no internet to distract me, and that gave me my first lessons on ethics, character and morals before life had taught them to me.
Captain, set course for home. Engage.